On Oct 8, 2008, at 4:09 PM, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
Drug type companies eat typical 0.5% system time.
Could you please explain what you mean here ? That they buy lots of
CPUs but only use a fraction of them or only for a fraction of time ?
When you add up others.
Note i see in IWR you got a 160 node opteron cluster, what software
eats system time on that cluster?
There must be graphs about it, want to share one? Also interesting to
know is how many cores most jobs eat!
Note that i left out 1 important factor which is not a factor in
every nation: that's the amount of system time airindustry eats of
supercomputers
designing new stuff. It is very significant together with car
manufacturers. With 160 nodes machine, even if that would be power6
nodes,
you can't even design a wing for aircraft.
They are far behind, which is not so logical; i would consider it
old fashioned to do experiments on monkeys (Bar-ilan brain
experiments on monkeys rings a bell?), so doing everything in
software is far more logical.
Maybe your knowledge about the pharma industry is far behind ?
"Doing everything in software is far more logical" only when you
can exactly express biological processes in mathematical terms
which is not true in the great majority of cases. F.e. molecular
dynamics (often used to simulate interactions at molecular level,
f.e. of a drug injected into the body) is based on several
approximations and the implementations are subject to numerical
errors. Would you take a drug that was produced based only on a
simulation with molecular dynamics and found to be good enough ?
Well, i sure avoid hospital visits, you?
As you know the healthcare commission is basically old men who spread
careful chosen sentences in such a manner that
everything looks fine on this planet and that there is nothing to
worry about; last time i spoke with them on EMF's a guy being spokesman
on this subject, he didn't even know how the electricity system in
his own house worked (whether on the first floor of his house
he had earth).
So lucky to introduce to a new drug, there is some burocratic
systems. There is several phases of testing that a drug
has to pass in order to get accepted as a drug that is legal. Not to
confuse with the 'advice' on whether a drug gets prescribed;
they want way cheaper drugs for that usually than the ones that might
maybe be better (say 0.5% better for a lot of money extra,
but if you're that guy that didn't get cured as a result of that,
your family will regret it bigtime).
Computing power or not, most manufacturers simply want to sell a
product, so the amount of systemtime invested on a computer,
in order to sell, is total irrelevant to them to get a drug accepted
usually. The first and most important part of the show to get a drug
accepted is getting invited to the table to show your drug. Computing
power is nice to mention here when that is usually not a factor
at all to get a new medicine accepted.
But it may change, let's hope so...
Maybe a new breed of company can do the job. A breed where making
profit is not most important :)
Similar concerns apply to all levels - the brain, as you mention
it, is still very much an enigma, otherwise artificial intelligence
would be all around us (or not, if deemed to dangerous...). And
when you don't know how an organ or system works, how can you
develops drugs only by simulations ?
When someone is really in big need for big calculation power, one
makes dedicated cpu's for it.
I tend to agree, provided that the dedicated CPU brings a really
big advantage, like an order of more of magnitude. F.e., to stay in
the pharma related field, that's the bussiness case for DEShaw
Research's molecular dynamics chip (Anton) which is supposed to
bring a significant increase in speed for MD simulations compared
with software solutions running on general purpose CPUs (or GPUs).
Some hardware guys can better comment here. Making your own FPGA
chippie is rather cheap.
Finding and paying a few good guys to get the chip done is toughest.
You basically need 1 good
programmer, the rest can get hired parttime in fact. After chip works,
to print a 1000 cards, it is like a 100 dollar for pci-card and 50
dollar a chip.
So $150k for computing power that total annihilates any supercomputer
of now and the NEAR future for your specific application.
Real cpu's are a lot faster of course, price for them i do not have
at hand. I heard it could be cheaper
than this in fact if you regurarly print a batch. Such a batch is
producing less cpu's than the FPGA, where you pay for 1 cpu a constant
amount. I tend to remember that good cpu designers, not to mention
memory controller guys, are rather expensive folks, as
they are very popular; on some other mailing list with some very
funny lastnames, i see nonstop job offers for that type of folks.
Vincent
--
Bogdan Costescu
IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8869/8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8868/8850
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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